Romanticism is best known as a movement celebrating political and imaginative liberty—the human mind freeing itself from the shackles of tradition. But Romanticism also coincided with the apex of the transatlantic slave trade. In this lecture, Mathelinda Nabugodi uncovers some of the links between the poetry of freedom and the practices of slavery in the […]

Dr Chris Townsend’s George Berkeley and Romanticism: Ghostly Language is published by Oxford University Press on May 5th. It’s a study of the idealist philosopher Berkeley and his impact on the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, offering new readings of each poet in light of their debt to Berkeley’s thought. It’s also an effort […]

Joe Shaughnessy has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship to complete 12 months of research based at the Department of English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town. He will be conducting research related to literary internationalism in southern Africa between 1900 and 1950; this research constitutes the final part of his doctoral project. […]

Dr Chris Townsend’s Philosophical Connections: Akenside, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism was published on May 2nd with Cambridge University Press, as part of their Elements series. It takes Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination as a vital link between Alexander Pope’s poetry and the Romantics. Dr Townsend draws attention in particular to Akenside’s focus on appearances and how […]

Dr Stephen Turton, along with Prof Charlotte Brewer (Oxford), has curated a small exhibition on ‘The Oxford English Dictionary and the Public’ at Oxford’s Weston Library. In order to create the OED, its first chief editor, James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915), wrote and received thousands of letters on the histories of words—so many that the […]

Professor Pete de Bolla has been elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Link to further information: https://www.amacad.org/news/2022-member-announcement

On Thursday, April 28-Saturday April 30, 2022, Revolutionary Papers (RP) will launch Revolutionary Papers: Counter-Institutions, Countercultures, and Counter-Politics in Periodicals of the Global South, an international conference and exhibition in Cape Town, South Africa. RP is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge English Faculty, the London School of Economics Sociology Department, and University of […]

Amidst global plans for economic recovery, resilience, and prosperity, academics and policymakers will meet for the Bennett Institute for Public Policy Annual Conference on Friday 22 April 2022 at the University of Cambridge. The day’s discussions will centre around the Institute’s four key research themes – Place, Progress, Productivity, and Decision-Making in Government. It will […]